


The Return of the (Worm) King

by modsenga



Category: Elder Scrolls, Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
Genre: Actual dragon!dovahkiin, Aftermath of Torture, Ash'abah, Dovahzul, Dysfunctional Relationships, Fantasy Violence, Gen, I-can't-believe-it's-not-actual-conlang, Implied Torture, M/M, Madia takes liberties with the College of Winterhold, also there will probably be big battles at some point, and no flight isn't a typo but it's truth either way I suppose, and with the law generally, as well as unnecessarily dramatic flight scenes, basically vegan necromancy, dragon meta, i mean it's DRAGONS c'mon, it sounds vaguely plausible therefore it's lore-friendly, lots of drabbles, right - Freeform, right??, shameless headcanoneering of Alik'r cultures
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-12-24
Updated: 2017-12-30
Packaged: 2019-02-19 11:42:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 9
Words: 3,882
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13123017
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/modsenga/pseuds/modsenga
Summary: Oh my gods my titles are horribleA series of drabbles involving Madia, my Last Dragonborn, and the return of a certain dramatic bi--...uhh, lich.(Now becoming a chapter fic!)





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This series of drabbles takes place after main questline, Dawnguard, Dragonborn and the Civil War. May (read: most likely will) develop into something longer. My aim is to make these standalone, but stories of Madia's early adventures and character development are in progress for those who want the full context. I'm more than happy to answer any questions y'all want to ask about her.
> 
> This is purely for my own entertainment and, though based on canon lore, is mostly the result of my own extrapolations and not necessarily lore-friendly. If this is your type of thing, then enjoy!

He crawls out of Oblivion, ashen-faced, worn down to nothing.  
There are bones showing through his flesh, in the places where the lashes bit. There are more of those now. No blood left; flesh chewed, colorless. Black pits beneath the eyes. He is brittle as sea-salt. Skin brushes away to powder at the touch of the real world.   
And when his mouth opens, raw magic leaks out.   
He no longer has the endurance to hold it in. It rolls off his dried tongue, hangs in the air like a mist. He wonders if this is what mortals feel when they bleed.  
He lies naked upon the face of Nirn until night falls. Beneath, in the damp ground, he hears the whispers of earthworms surfacing.

Someone trips over his bones.


	2. Chapter 2

She is in the deep south of Falkreath when she hears it. The news, winging its way to her in the form of a ghostly messenger crow: Mannimarco, King of Worms, has returned to Nirn. She recognizes the swirling fogginess of the Archmage's magic in the familiar's beady eye. She recognizes the urgency in his handwriting.

 _Come,_ says the College. _Come_ _quickly_.

Through the deep of the forest, until the branches thin. Below her sprawls the valley: ancient, belly-shaped. Nestled around a lake that was once a river of ice. Out here, gray skies arch overhead: her road to anywhere. As the fire consumes her skin and the scales take her, she thinks she is preparing for war.

She spreads her wings and races north against a cold wind.


	3. Chapter 3

Madia arrives after dark, and they sweep her inside. The College cannot wake, they tell her. Must not wake, not for this. Cloaked under the night, hurried like mice, they bundle her into the Hall of the Elements, whispering of the prisoner bound deep below.

_Change him,_ they say _. Change him so that we may draw the knife._

She does not understand.

They pull her down anyway, into the earth. Down shivering passages, beneath cobbled courtyards drunk with moonlight, through ice and stone and traces of ancient energy that press close against her soul, prickling. Through neglect, then ruin. Past the ghosts of things better left untouched. She clutches the cloak of dragon scales tight around her shoulders and listens to the voices of the mages as they descend.

Snatches of history. Hints of horror. Words that spill from mouths like salt from a torn sack. Words that they toss over their shoulders like wards.

She scrapes them up from the tunnel floors as they go, and begins to understand. Around them the stone presses close. Tunnels narrow as though trying to block their way. A parent's arms, thrown out to shield a child from what lies in wait ahead.

_Take me to the King,_ she thinks dryly. The Middens grow darker still.


	4. Chapter 4

Mannimarco is no longer the King of Worms.

Mannimarco is no longer the king of anything.

He hangs in the bowels of Winterhold's dungeons, suspended at the wrists by two cords of lightning. They have dressed him in little more than sack-cloth (he wakes to discover that even the dead can itch); the lightning stings, wasp-like, whenever he moves. In front of him, a man robed in grey looms like a thunderhead. In his hand is a staff whose glowing green eye seems to drain him to the core.  Beyond, among the shadows, a host of spellcasters watches and waits.

He'd attacked the mages, of course. When a troupe of apprentices had come trudging down the mountain and tripped on him, they'd fired off spells, mistaking the prone body for a draugr. Three were dead before conscious thought could set in. The fourth ran.

Reinforcements came with the dawn. Eight battlemages, an illusionist, and the man in grey surrounded their quarry and cornered him under the last of the starlight. They left in their wake a scarred mountainside and the trail of something heavy dragged through the snow.

His hands flex within their binds. Electricity frays him to the shoulders. But there is not enough of him left to cry out.

Once, he might have laughed at eight battlemages. Now, the cadaver that Oblivion has made of him can barely string sinew to bone.

The man in grey steps forward and levels the staff once more. The green eye flares to life. It sears into the catacomb of his ribs and absorbs him, endlessly, mercilessly, leaving hunger stripes marbled upon his skin. Just more paint to add to the shredded canvas that was once Mannimarco.

What little magic has managed to grow in his bones dies with a whimper. His fingers clench tighter. To have his magic fed on by a mere tool, as a spider feeds on a fly! To escape from torment, only to be chained again! Rage burns down his throat. Deeper and deeper, until it burns down into shame.

Out from one prison, and into another. So much effort wasted. In the deep recesses of his mind, he hears Molag Bal laughing.


	5. Chapter 5

There are ghosts in Madia's head.

There have been ghosts in her head ever since her first tattoo. She remembers vividly her first Namesinging, kneeling in the sand with bare feet and hot skin, next to a woman who was not her mother but may as well have been. Remembers the snake that coiled tight in her lungs as she threw her voice out into the desert. Remembers the reply that came from nowhere, rising voiceless within the core of her like fire and windburn: memories of swords in her hands and blood running into her eyes, of deaths and births, of long marches and cold nights on campaign. She'd been ten years old. She had never bloodied a blade.

She remembers the mark they etched into the back of her neck, blood and sunlight and red ink and charcoal. The hands that pressed her shoulders, blessing the life in her skin. The embrace, felt soul-deep, from forebears she would never meet. The way she never looked at the world the same way again; the taste of memory, the vibrancy of the living, the way every wind and stone and thing that grew seemed to have a name.

She remembers her first Healing.

The corpse had been wandering through the desert, a figure of leather and sticks with a bundle of dried flowers clutched in her hand. Her dress, faded to the color of chalk; her scarf, a bare string. There had been an arrow protruding from her calf. Madia never knew where her conjuror had been or whether they lived. To all appearances the dead girl was alone. Her confusion was a stain of agony on the desert wind.

Madia, carrying eleven summers on her back, forgot her rituals. Forgot her prayers. Forgot everything but the sight of the dead girl dragging, step by wavering step, her weathered feet through the sand. She barely remembers taking the dead girl's hand and walking her back to the Ash'abah, crying her grief for her. But they told her later. That she led the girl to the Namesinger's tent as gently as a woman helping an aged grandmother to bed.  That she came in silence, and with tears streaming down her dark face.

Since then, Madia has cried for the dead three hundred and seventy-seven times. Sometimes it happens in the mornings, when she Sings their names. Other times it happens after the death of a necromancer, wiping her blade on frayed black robes with sweat on her forehead and blood on her face. Sometimes, the voice of the dead girl cries with her. Or her mother. Or her father, whom she never knew. Other times, she cries alone.

But always, always, there is peace. There is joy. There is Healing.

 

There is no Healing beneath the tunnels of Winterhold.

This time, when the spirits of the dead rise in the back of her throat, she knows their terror. She feels the Life draining away from the caverns ahead, fleeing back up the tunnels, retreating into the stones beneath her feet. She feels the life energy of the mages like beacons, bright against the blackness. Her own blood beats faster in her veins. Her Energy trembles beneath her skin.

 _Come home with me, be home with me,_ she sings to the dead in her mind. They huddle close to the words of their shared native tongue: cold refugees gathered around a taper. _Bring love to me, be loved in me. Be the stars to guide me. Be the freedom that awaits me._ She mouths the words as she goes, but she finds little comfort in them tonight. Down here, the air is sick; she feels it in her soul. She wants to flee at its touch.

The mages feel nothing. Ahead, round a bend in the passage, is a door.  She watches them plow ahead and shoulder it open, their spines cast in iron.   _Come,_ they say to her. _Behold the King._ In their faces she sees fear and she sees reverence, and she wonders if they are the same thing.

She steps into the doorway.


	6. Chapter 6

A hollow _boom_ as the iron door swings open. The cavern shudders.  A shadow falls across his shackles, and for a moment, he thinks the Prince has entered his cell.  He sees clawed hands clenching lashes made of fire; he sees clawed hands clenching nothing, but slick with the acid from his own mummified body.  The memory of pain blooms in his sallow flesh.  He convulses again, but not from the lightning cords. 

(His fear – raw, pulsing – is the only thing left of him that could still be considered alive.)

Magelight bursts into the cell. Pounding feet echo across the walls.  Suddenly the cell is tight, close, warm with the breaths of a dozen angry men.  The air crackles.  Mannimarco looks up.  Whatever new torment has come for him, he will face it with both eyes open.

The entity standing in the door is not the Prince.

They are ancient – he knows that at once. Ancient and massive, a planet all on their own, coalescing into a single compact silhouette.  Shattered though he is, he can feel it.  The Aurbis, bending itself towards this entity like water falling from a tap.  The forces of Nirn, hushing themselves in anticipation.  The creak of the universe around it, settling wherever it moves.

And Mannimarco, King of Nothing, is afraid.

~~~~~

They open the door to the sight of a hanging corpse, and Madia is confused.

The source of Death is nowhere to be found. She sees no conjuror, no magister, no necro-witch capable of infusing the dead with such despair.  She strides into the room with her hand on her sword. The Archmage is standing before the corpse with Magnus’s staff poised in hand. She levels her gaze upon him. 

_You've shown me a body,_ she says. _Where is its defiler?_

The Archmage looks at her as though she is crazy.

 _He is before you,_ he answers _. Do you not know what you see?_

Madia looks at the corpse again, and this time she sees him. Sees past him, right to the source of the nightmare.

The soul before her is stripped bare. Fragments of its spirit hang loose, fractured apart like pieces of a broken crystal.  The veins of its magicka are thin and frayed, bent in stunted patterns.  And something else…something else is growing from its midst like a strangling vine, something that curdles and cloys in the back of her throat like a phlegm, something that sends branches of horror crawling throughout the room, and caught in a morbid entrancement she reaches further in, trying to see it—

The corpse is staring at her now. She has come within an arm’s length.  But she does not back away. Despair sediments itself in her blood.

This is beyond her skill to heal.

The man robed in grey is watching her with eyes hot and dark as embers. The staff rests at his side, alight with Mannimarco’s magic. _Now you see,_ says the heat in his eyes.

What she sees is a tragedy.

 _I see,_ she says.


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey, guys! Chapters will probably be more chapter-like from here on out, because I can feel this wanting to turn into a Big Damn Story (go figure). There might still be elements of drabble-writing scattered throughout, but dialogue will actually be dialogue now and chapters will probably be longer, so I may end up updating every other day instead of every day. Or not; it depends on the size of the chapter, I guess. Enjoy!

They want her to unmake him.

At least, that is what Mannimarco is relatively sure they want. Two hundred years of separation since his last day on Nirn has left his skill at the common tongue…lacking. Compared to Altmeris, which changes little, the form of Tamrielic has acquired the same short lifespan as most of those who speak it. What he hears from the mouths around him now is blurred and distorted, and nothing seems to be pronounced quite right.

But some words leap out and cling to him, even as the Archmage draws the woman away, speaking to her in quick and urgent tones. Certain phrases, muddied but more or less preserved in sound through the centuries, fall on his ears without trouble. _World-Eater. Dragon-God. Time. Resurrection. Undoing. Can’t [destroy] him without it._

Mannimarco has little context for these things. But he did not rise into legend by being a fool. He flexes his fingers (thoughtlessly; the lightning that binds his wrists shocks him again) and wonders at the connection between the undoing of Time and the small, unassuming woman before him.

And she _is_ unassuming – the least in stature of all those present, he would have thought, just by her apparel alone. The influx of power he’d sensed when the door to his cell swung open has faded with her approach, though something of it shimmers still at the edge of his awareness; like charisma, and yet unlike it, for she is subtle in voice and in movement. She walks among the robed and embroidered mages in plain tunic and leathers; she has designed herself to divert the eye. Her only adornments are the sabre at her hip and the mask of red ink, raccoon-like, across her face. She has the look of a bandit.

“…cannot apologize for the short notice,” the Archmage is saying. “We could not afford to wait for other options. The renown of the Ash’abah at such work is not limited to the deserts of the Alik’r, and you have saved us in the past. Besides that, you are the only one who can wield this power.”

The woman nods thoughtfully, and Mannimarco’s eyes narrow of their own accord. So Hammerfell has sent their attack dogs to dispose of him, have they? Interesting. He supposes he should be flattered, given the remoteness of their location, and yet he finds he cannot quite muster the energy. There was a reason he’d always sent servants to do his work for him in Hammerfell, after all. He wonders – almost idly – what sort of unstoppable godlike power the inhabitants of Nirn are planning to throw at him this time.

“So you wish me,” he hears her say in a voice rich and dark, “to bring him back to life.”

Mannimarco’s analysis stumbles.

_What?_

“Yes,” says the voice of the Archmage, swift and certain. “So long as he exists in this…unnatural state, we shall never have the power to break the chain that links him to this world. He will return again, as he has before, for as long as there is anything left of him. The cycle must end once and for all.” Murmurs of agreement rippled throughout the stone room.

They are talking about his undeath.

“And your mages have no other method of achieving this?”

The Archmage shakes his head. “No. Our studies do not extend to spellwork of this nature, let alone to transformations of such magnitude…”

Mannimarco does not hear the rest of the Archmage’s reply. His mind has turned once again to the flicker of this woman’s power at the outer rim of his senses. Unnerving, how quickly he had forgotten the size of it. Had passed it over, just as an inexperienced thief might pass over an unassuming item, only to realize its value after the opportunity was long gone. Even now he struggles to recall the immensity of its first impression upon his mind.

Suddenly he is uncertain. The Ash’abah, for all their known savagery against the darker arts, cannot reverse death. Not even Meridia has that strength, as far as he is aware, and he is aware of a great many things concerning the Daedra. So what manner of power is this that they bandy between their lips like a bottle of shared wine, so cavalier and yet so deadly?

Movement causes him to look up. The woman is approaching him now, hand easy on the sword-hilt. Her face is inscrutable. The mages, as if unconsciously, fall in from behind. All are drawn to the progress of her soft steps across the room. Mannimarco, though already dead, tenses.

She stops within inches of him. Stares into him with eyes dark and unreadable. Her short frame shimmers in his mind, outlined from within by something far more massive. A lone moon blocking the light of a sun. He cannot help the defiant snarl that lifts his cracked lips. As he hangs there before her, waiting to see himself undone or at the very least killed again, he remembers the flash of Molag Bal’s fanged grin of triumph – and suddenly it is there, so close, the bounds of Coldharbor whispering to him from only moments away. The mages are pressing in now, not with their bodies but with their eyes, waiting for the strike that is surely coming. So certain of his fate. _Finish it,_ says the hunger in their faces, and he quails, imagining the retribution that awaits him for having escaped the Prince—

“No.”

_…No?_

The sentiment in Mannimarco’s head echoes itself in the face of the Archmage. The Dunmer’s brows have disappeared up into his hairline. “I must have misheard you,” he says, though he has not misheard. _“No?”_

“No,” she repeats.

“Why ever not?” Beneath the veneer of his politeness, a thin slice of steel creeps into the Archmage’s voice. Mannimarco finds himself pricking his ears for her answer.

The Alik’r warrior’s face remains as neutral as a mirror. “Because you misunderstand my imperative. The Ash’abah protect the dead from the living and the living from the dead. We keep the balance between two worlds of energy. There is nothing I can do for a living soul that chooses to take death into itself.”

“But you are not just Ash’abah,” says the Dunmer, fiery now. “You wield the voice of dragons—“

“—Who speak only in times of True Need,” the woman finishes for him. She turns her face from Mannimarco and begins to walk away. “You have asked me to change a man’s nature. I cannot do that without changing his Name. And I will not change a Name without the consent of the changed. I do not care what he has done.”

Mannimarco hangs from his chains of lightning and tries not to show his interest.

“You don’t consider ending the threat of the King of Worms a _true need?_ That mer has been a plague on the living and the dead of Tamriel since the Second Era! This is our chance to end his curse forever, for the good of all the provinces!”

“I know of his misdeeds,” says the Ash’abah, and this time her voice is the slow seep of water beneath the cracked foundation of a castle: a sourceless, lurking danger. “We of the Alik’r have lost more forebears to his minions than the people of any other province. We have more cause to hate him than any of you. If you wish me to take a blade to his neck, I will do it and gladly. But I will not unmake any man or mer from what they have made themselves. Find someone else to strip him for parts.”

Well. That is…less favorable.

 _But still an opportunity,_ he thinks, and wonders how best to utilize his borrowed time. Across the room, the Redguard warrior is still striding away, heading straight for the iron door that will take her out and up to the sunlight.

The door slams closed of its own accord.


	8. Chapter 8

Time crystallizes into a slow frost-fall.

The Ash’abah warrior has stopped walking. She stares at the iron door, still ringing with the echo of its closure. Ever so carefully, she turns on her heel and levels her gaze at the Archmage, who stands behind her with his head held high. The image of them, frozen, hangs for one shivering moment in a delicate balance: the warrior, the mages, and the closed doorway presiding over all. The Archmage’s fingers are still wispy with pale strands of magic.

“I cannot allow anything less than the end of his immortality,” he says. “You are trusted by the College, and so I have no qualms about leaving the prisoner in your capable hands. I hope that when I return, it will be to a better understanding between us.”

The Ash’abah warrior smiles.

“I must have misheard you,” she says (and Mannimarco thinks he might have been inclined to laugh, once upon a time). “Surely you are not thinking of leaving me alone in a cold, comfortless dungeon cell beneath millions of tons of rock, in the company of a horrendously dangerous necromancer, in order to force my compliance on a matter of ethics? Surely such heavy-handed tactics are beyond you, my kind host.”

Perhaps a few of the mages shift uncomfortably as she speaks. Perhaps the softness of her accusation turns a few pairs of eyes to the floor in embarrassment. Perhaps it is only Mannimarco’s wishful thinking.

But the Archmage does not bend. “Only for a short time,” he says, not bothering to grace her challenge with a reply. “Believe me, I do not prefer this. But you must understand the severity of our situation, friend. This matter is not open to negotiation.”

“So, a few hours of lonely contemplation for the wayward hero, then.” The warrior remains, to Mannimarco’s eyes, amazingly tranquil. “You think time will change my answer?”

“I think time changes everything,” the Archmage says, as the air around him begins to glow. The battlemages begin moving past her into the reach of his spell. The spell extends around them; soon the air is foggy with the glow of magic. “If you do not have his permission to change him, then perhaps that permission can be… _obtained._ Good night, Madia.”

The warrior woman sinks her weight into one hip and folds her arms, watching as their collective outline brightens. The magic casts a violet reflection in her eyes; whatever she is thinking is masked beneath a haze of color. Beyond, the iron door fuses itself into the wall with a sound like a heavy coffin lid closing. The Archmage and his sorcerers brighten, fade, and disappear. They leave bare stone floors and the echoes of an empty room in their wake.

The two prisoners are alone.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Short but sweet. I may or may not fuse tomorrow's chapter to this one for a longer installment, so be sure to check for updates. My warm thanks to everyone who's enjoyed this story so far; your comments and kudos brighten my day. <3


	9. Author's PSA

Hey, guys! Sorry I didn't get a chapter up today - I ended up going to an elderly relative's birthday party during the time I'd planned to be writing this story, and it dragged on pretty late, so tonight I'm just gonna hit the hay. Expect some mutual bitching from Madia and Mannimarco on the morrow!

Cheers,

\-- Senga


End file.
